stral possessions of the Cassiodori were
situated m that southernmost province, sometimes likened to the toe of
Italy, which was then called Bruttii, and is now called Calabria. It was
a land rich in cattle, renowned for its cheese and for its aromatic,
white Palmatian wine; and veins of gold were said to be in its
mountains. Here, in the old Greek city of Scyllacium _(Sguillace)_, "a
city perched upon a high hill overlooking the sea, sunny yet fanned by
cool Mediterranean breezes, and looking peacefully on the cornfields,
the vineyards, and the olive-groves around her",[86] Cassiodorus was
born, about the year 480. He was therefore probably some twelve or
thirteen years of age when the long strife between Odovacar and
Theodoric was ended by the murder scene in the palace at Ravenna.

[Footnote 86: The description is taken from Cassiodorus, Var., xii.,
15.]

Like all the young Roman nobles who aspired to the honours and
emoluments of public life, Cassiodorus studied philosophy and rhetoric,
and, according to the standard of the age, a degraded standard, he
acquired great proficiency in both lines of study. When his father was
made Praetorian Prefect (about the year 500), the young rhetorician
received an appointment as _Consiliarius_, or Assessor in the Prefect's
court, at a salary which probably did not exceed forty or fifty pounds.
While he was holding this position, it fell to his lot to pronounce a
laudatory oration on Theodoric (perhaps on the occasion of one of his
visits to Rome), and the eloquence of the young _Consiliarius_ so
delighted the King, that he was at once made an "Illustrious" Quaestor,
thus receiving what we should call cabinet-rank while he was still
considerably under thirty years of age. The Quaestor, as has been said,
was the Public Orator of the State. It devolved upon him to reply to the
formal harangues in which the ambassadors of foreign nations greeted his
master, to answer the petitions of his subjects, and to see that the
edicts of the sovereign were expressed in proper terms. The post exactly
fitted the intellectual tendencies of Cassiodorus, who was never so
happy as when he was wrapping up some commonplace thought in a garment
of sonorous but turgid rhetoric; and the simple honesty of his moral
nature, simple in its very vanity and honest in its childlike egotism,
coupled as it was with real love for his country and loyal zeal for her
welfare, endeared him in his turn to Theodoric, wi